This essay explores Fanon's overt and covert uses of African
American folk hero, Brer Rabbit in Black Skin White Masks by following
up on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s call for "properly
contextualized readings of Fanon's opus in relation to other
germinal works of his era." Examining Fanon's relationship to
Black American culture as distilled in the pages of Les temps modernes
exposes some interesting anomalies in his identity politics vis-a-vis
Black America. His manipulation of "The Malevolent Rabbit"
trope identified by Bernard Wolfe creates a complex dialogue between
oral and print sources which enabled him to employ rhetorical strategies
derived from the folk culture of Africans in the Americas to plead his
case before the white metropolitan audience even as he resisted earlier
Negritude writers' pretentions to pandiasporic identity.

In his 1991 essay, "Critical Fanonism," Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. called for "properly contextualized readings of
Fanon's opus in relation to other germinal works of his era."
(1) This study will therefore take Gates' methodological cue and
focus on Fanon's relationship to Black American culture as
distilled in the pages of Les temps modernes. Over the first ten years
of its existence from 1946-56 the writers who contributed to Les temps
modernes frequently offered critical analyses of contemporary American
society. The combined August/September issue for 1946 was devoted
exclusively to consideration of the USA, its situations, myths, and
people. The articles in this issue include excerpts from James Weldon
Johnson's American Book of Negro Spirituals as well as extensive
selections from St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's Black
Metropolis. Thus, in addition to his familiarity with the literary works
of Black American writers in translation, Fanon also had the opportunity
to absorb the themes and methods of Black American cultural critics
several years before he published Black Skin White Masks. While Fanon
refers to Black American culture in articulating his theories on the
psychology of oppression, there are some interesting anomalies in his
identity politics vis-a-vis Black America. More specifically, Fanon
resisted earlier Negritude writers' pretentions to pan-diasporic
identity even while he employed rhetorical strategies derived from the
folk culture of Africans in the Americas to plead his case before the
white metropolitan audience. This essay will explore Fanon's overt
and covert uses of African American folk hero, Brer Rabbit in Black Skin
White Masks. (2)

The Malevolent Rabbit

Ostensibly, Fanon's primary source of knowledge about Brer
Rabbit is an article by Bernard Wolfe, which appeared in the May 1949
issue of Les temps modernes. In "Uncle Remus and the Malevolent
Rabbit," Wolfe initially explores the ubiquity of the grinning
Negro in American consumer culture. He questions why whites find figures
like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben so reassuring and whether in real life
the black grin might not mask the hostility of an oppressed people.
Next, he traces the grinning Negro back to Joel Chandler Harris'
creation of Uncle Remus. Wolfe regards Harris as a masochistic racist
who understood the revenge fantasies embedded in the Brer Rabbit cycle
but identified with the Negro in spite of himself. Wolfe argues that
Harris' stammer and social discomfort were signs of a central
paradox in white American identity:

The Temps modernes version of Wolfe's article predates the
English Commentary version by two months, but neither journal
acknowledges a prior copyright. The Temps modernes version incorporates
more Freudian analysis than the version which appeared in the July 1949
issue of Commentary, yet it omits Wolfe's foray into the
Herskovits/Frazier controversy over the extent to which survivals from
African cultures influenced the development of African American culture
in the United States. Herskovits, an anthropologist, documented
extensive African survivals in the New World in an effort to counter
racist assertions that Negroes had no culture and no history.

African American sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier downplayed the
influence of African survivals on the development of African American
culture in order to bolster his case that Negroes were as American as
any other group and deserved full citizenship. The two scholars differed
more in their emphasis than in their aims.

Wolfe's Freudian interpretation adds an interesting twist to
the debate. He asserts that white racists needed to believe the Brer
Rabbit tales came from Africa in order to deny their symbolic content.
If the tales did not arise in response to American experience, then the
plantocrats would not have to recognize the anthropomorphic symbolism
woven into them. They would not have to acknowledge that the Brer Rabbit
stories offered models of subversion and resistance and contained a
powerful critique of the plantation system. Wolfe, like Frazier,
discounts Herskovits' theses about African survivals in North
America. Instead, he proposes a neo-French genealogy for the tales,
tracing them from the stories twelfth-century Flemish peasants told
about Reynard, the fox, to versions African slaves might have learned
from French plantation owners "whether in the Louisiana territory,
the Acadian-French sections of North Carolina, or the West Indies."
(4)

In common with the antebellum plantocrats, the editors of Les temps
modernes demonstrated an ideological need to displace and disavow the
origins of the Brer Rabbit tales from the site of oppression. The Temps
modernes version of Wolfe's article eliminated the
"reynard" thesis and censored other aspects of Wolfe's
analysis which might apply to France's colonial history and racial
hegemony. By 1949 the roman colonial and travelogue genres had
familiarized the French metropolitan audience with certain folkloric
elements of colonial local color, but Rene Guyonnet's translation
insistently Europeanizes the antebellum plantation milieu despite the
existence of French equivalents from the plantation societies of the
French Caribbean. (5) Thus, he changes Brer Rabbit into "Frere
Lapin" rather than "Compe Lapin." The "big
house" becomes the "maison des maetres" as if
metropolitan readers could not possibly imagine the architectural
contrasts between the "case" and
"l'habitation." Uncle Remus' endearment,
"honey" is rendered as "mignon" although the term
"doudou" invokes the same plantation nostalgia in French
audiences that "honey chile" does for American whites.
Guyonnet even transforms the landscape into rural France. Persimmon
trees become plum trees although the French are familiar with
"plaquemines de la virginie" as well as "plaquemines du
japon." Meanwhile Frere Lapin plunders a bitter apple orchard
(coloquintes) instead of a "goober patch" at a time when
French farmers were fattening their hogs on groundnuts (arachides)
imported from the colonial territories in French West Africa. All in
all, this translation carefully shields the French audience from having
to apply Wolfe's analysis of American racism to the French colonial
context. Wolfe's psychoanalytic exploration of racism nevertheless
enriched Fanon's reflections on the psychology of oppression and
suggested specific tools for working an ironic revenge on the
neocolonial mentality.

In a footnote, Wolfe suggests that Uncle Remus is the twin of the
mythical Romulus who founded Rome:

As Wolfe admits, the symbolism is not neatly ordered. His analysis
of parallels between the mythology of the antebellum South and the
mythological origins of Ancient Rome might have been more convincing had
he placed it in the context of antebellum naming practices which
juxtaposed Greco-Roman civilization with African "barbarism."
The presence of Black Pompeys and Scipios was an oxymoronic joke to the
southern plantocrats who bestowed these names on their human chattel.

In the subtext of "The Fact of Blackness" and "The
Negro and Psychopathology," Fanon takes issue with just such an
oxymoronic sobriquet. When Sartre entitled his preface to Leopold S.
Senghor's 1948 Nouvelle anthologie de la poesie negre et malgache
de langue francaise "Orphee noir," he probably did not intend
to invoke a risible absurdity, but contemporary readers in the metropole
would definitely have found the juxtaposition black/Orpheus provocative.
Fanon also found the preface provocative in its imposition of eroticized
exotic desire onto the Negritude poets: Sartre announces that "Pour
nos poetes noirs, au contraire, l'etre sort du Neant comme une
verge qui se dresse" ("For our black poets being emerges from
Nothingness like a penis becoming erect."). (7) The rhetorical
structure of "The Fact of Blackness" and "The Negro and
Psychopathology" indicates that Fanon read lines like these as a
homoerotic overture that demeaned his and every Black man's
virility. Bernard Wolfe's article reminded him that he could resort
to the stratagems of the vernacular culture to exact his revenge.

Fanon greatly admired the Civil Rights struggles of the American
Negro:

Fanon, like Sartre, believed that the Self is defined through
violent struggle with the Other. Therefore, the Black American's
fight for freedom allowed him to dignify himself as a man. In contrast,
despite the history of Martinican slave revolts and slave resistance,
despite the looming shadow of the Haitian Revolution, Fanon regarded
freedom in the Antilles as something that had been bestowed by
legislative fiat. The Black American was forging his manhood in blood
while the French Negro was "unable to be sure whether the white man
considers him consciousness in-itself-for-itself, he must forever absorb
himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge." (9) The
phrase "consciousness in-itself-for-itself" of course reprises
Sartre's phenomenological speculations, but there was no room
within Sartre's dialectical vision of Negritude for Fanon to compel
the "master" to recognize him. As Hegel had argued long
before, the "slave" had a more holistic view of the
master/slave dialectic but lacked the power to make the
"master" see the reality of either the enslaved position or
the master's privileged position within the hierarchy.

Instead, appropriating the rhetoric of the Brer Rabbit tales
allowed Fanon to effect an ironic reversal of the master/slave dialectic
which Sartre's patronizing preface perpetuated despite its liberal
intent. First of all, in keeping with the necessity dictated by his
subaltern position, Fanon laid this trap as a covert strategy of
resistance. His initial assertion that "The folklore of Martinique
is meager, and few children in Fort-de-France know the stories of
'Compe Lapin,' twin brother of the Br'er Rabbit of
Louisiana's [sic] Uncle Remus" is a posture similar to that of
Joel Chandler Harris's informants who claimed not to know any Brer
Rabbit stories. (10) Harris would then tell a Brer Rabbit story that he
had previously collected. This technique usually overcame suspicion of
him as an outsider and prompted informants to share more subversive
tales. The fact that Fanon displaces Brer Rabbit from Anglophone Georgia
to Creole Louisiana reveals that he knew more about the trickster than
he wanted to admit. For while Joel Chandler Harris's contemporary,
Alcee Fortier did collect Compe Lapin stories on the Lara Plantation in
Louisiana and published them as Louisiana folk-tales in French dialect
and English translation in 1894, Fanon most likely heard the exploits of
Compe Lapin in the original Creole during his boyhood days in
Martinique. Wolfe's article freed him to elaborate his own versions
of the tales' subversion. Indeed, Fanon proved himself a consummate
manipulator of narrative masks.

Fanon as Conteur

Throughout most of Black Skin White Masks, Fanon narrates through
the first person plural pronoun, "nous." This device has many
probable origins. It invests Fanon with the "objective"
authority of the scientific observer. It reflects the phenomenological
style Sartre used when exploring the problem of intersubjectivity in
Being and Nothingness. It also manifests Fanon's claim to speak to
and about a collective experience of oppression and empowers him to
speak for the oppressed. Markmann's translation uniformly renders
Fanon's shifting narrative personas through the pronoun
"I." This reduces readers' ability to recognize
Fanon's pervasive irony and phenomenological reflection on
subjectivity. It also obscures Fanon's rhetorical roots in the
conteur tradition.

A good storyteller has to make all the characters come to life by
adopting a different vocal quality and set of gestures for each one.
Consequently the storyteller inhabits many different points of view in
succession. Fanon was a master of this technique. In his biography of
Fanon, Peter Geismar documents this aspect of Fanon's personality:

Fanon also made occasional use of folkloric material to
authenticate his observations. For example, he recounts the following
joke in "The Man of Color and the White Woman": "Some
thirty years ago, a coal-black Negro in a Paris bed with a
'maddening' blonde, shouted at the moment of orgasm,
'Hurrah for Schoelcher!'." (12) In the national mythos of
Martinique, Schoelcher is revered as the liberator of the enslaved
population. Hence Fanon's narrative technique forces the reader to
savor the tale before he acknowledges that it is merely an anecdotal
expression of "the spirit of the group." Fanon's
storytelling prowess is also evident in the "Look, a Negro!"
sequence from "The Fact of Blackness." In this passage he uses
direct citation and interior monologue to shift rapidly between the
perspectives of the small boy cringing at the sight of a "savage
Negro," the boy's embarrassed mother, and the Negro narrator
of the sequence. Other passages where this technique is at work include
the patronizing voice of the white official addressing blacks and Arabs
in pidgin: "'Sit there, boy...What's bothering you?'
'Where does it hurt, huh?' 'You not feel good,
no?'." (13)

In addition to his mastery of characterization, Fanon demonstrates
true artistry in embedding vernacular rhetoric within his ideological
quarrels with Sartre. Wolfe cites the story of how Brer Rabbit made Brer
Fox his riding horse as an example of the revenge function the tales
serve in vernacular black culture. In the original story, Brer Rabbit
boasts to the "ladies" at Miss Fields' establishment that
he can make Brer Fox into his riding horse. He then feigns illness and
convinces Brer Fox to carry him on his back. Pleading weakness, he
persuades Brer Fox to put on a saddle and bridle so that he (Brer
Rabbit) won't fall off before they reach their destination. When
they pass by Miss Fields' house, however, Brer Rabbit applies the
spurs and demonstrates his dominance over his rival. The admiring female
audience for this exploit further sexualizes Brer Rabbit's ironic
reversal of the master/slave power dynamic. Close reading of
Fanon's response to "Orphee noir" reveals that this tale
serves as the deep structure organizing principle of both "The Fact
of Blackness" and "The Negro and Psychopathology" in
Black Skin White Masks.

Fanon closes "The Fact of Blackness" with the beleaguered
Negro narrator's confession "Without responsibility,
straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep". (14) This
line is even more powerful in the original French as "a cheval
entre le Neant et l'Infini" more directly evokes the sexual
connotations of our slang "in the saddle." The invocation of
Sartre's famous title (Being and Nothingness) then indicates that
Brer Fanon has mounted J-P as his riding horse. In "The
Psychopathology of the Negro," he applies the spurs, using
Wolfe's analysis of whites' masochistic pleasure in the Brer
Rabbit stories as the foundation of his argument that the white
negrophobe is really motivated by homosexual desire. Having called
Sartre on the homoerotic overtones of his "Orphee noir"
preface, Fanon's vernacular rhetoric simultaneously exposes the
underlying racism in the text.

In conclusion, this study demonstrates the need for archival
research on the sources that informed Fanon's work. "Properly
contextualized," Fanon's manipulation of "The Malevolent
Rabbit" reveals a complex dialogue with both oral and print
sources. Yet persistent negligence in this area of scholarship threatens
to turn Fanon studies into an off-shore enterprise for manufacturing
"multi-culturalism" at minimal social or psychic cost to the
status quo.

(5) The roman colonial or novel of the colonies was a distinct
genre in 19th and early 20th century French letters. There were specific
literary prizes awarded for works in this genre and Pierre Loti was
elected to the Academie francaise on the strength of his contributions
to the genre.

Harris, the archetypical white Southerner, sought the Negro's love,
and pretended he had received it (Remus'grin). But he sought the
Negro's hate too (Brer Rabbit), and reveled in it in an
un-conscious orgy of masochism--punishing himself, possibly, for
not being the Negro, the stereotypical Negro, the unstinting giver.
Harris's inner split--and the South's, and white America's--is
mirrored in the fantastic disparity between Remus's beaming face
and Brer Rabbit's acts. (3)

Of course there isn't a neatly ordered symbolism here but for the
Southerner after the Civil War, the story of the biological
similarity between races (Romulus and Remus were twins), of the
fratricidal character of racism (Romulus killed Remus), the revolt
of apparently docile slaves (Romulus founded Rome as a refuge for
fugitive slaves), of the sexual fears which motivated and
perpetuated racism (lacking women of their own, Romulus and his
companions carried off the Sabine women), of racial amalgamation as
the foundation of the future society (Romulus' people and the
Sabines ended up intermarrying after many bloody battles and the
result was the Roman people) must have had some resonances. (6)

In the United States, the Negro battles and is battled. There are
laws that, little by little, are invalidated under the
Constitution. There are other laws that forbid certain forms of
discrimination. And we can be sure that nothing is going to be
given free. There is war, there are defeats, truces, victories. (8)

In Algeria I asked one of Fanon's closest friends to give me a
description of the man. He seemed perplexed, answering, 'It's hard.
His face was always changing, especially when he talked. You know,
as he told stories he'd act out the parts of the people he was
describing. He could be like Marcel Marceau. (11)